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Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Does suffering improve us?

"There are some questions that are persistently treated as though they were ethical, spiritual or philosophical when actually, they're just plain factual. "Does suffering improve us?" is one of them. There are some theoretical issues around what "improvement" and "suffering" mean, but the answer comes mostly not from intellectual reflection but empirical observation. And that answer seems to be a pretty unequivocal no."